A Walk on the Wild Side (23 page)

‘What’s so looney about that?’ Fort Worth wanted to know.

‘After last night I don’t see how that broad can get downstairs with or without clothes,’ Frenchy marveled from behind Joan Crawford’s eyebrows, ‘I don’t even see how she can rise.’

‘She’ll rise and she’ll get down here and eat grits and ham enough for six, too, you’ll see if she don’t,’ Fort Worth promised. ‘She don’t even know she got a stomach, that one.’

‘Any broad that’ll make love
back
to her tricks,’ Reba reflected sadly, ‘—no wonder she got a appetite.’

‘Don’t begrudge the child her food,’ Mama reproved them all, ‘she got her ways and you got yours.’

‘If that pimp of hers had a saltspoon of sense in his head,’ Frenchy decided, ‘he’d wise her up. What’s a pimp for?’

‘You tell me,’ Fort Worth put Frenchy down fast, ‘you work for one.’

The door was swung wide and a legless giant, buckled onto a sort of street-going raft built over roller skates, wheeled in like one who came here every day, making a hollow thunder across the planking as he came. Dove watched him unbuckle his straps and leap, in a single bound, onto a low divan.

The little black boy came up to this enormous torso without fear, to study him comparatively. The great cripple gave him a coin, but the boy remained unsmiling before him. Suddenly he asked, ‘What they done to
you?
’

‘Such a
serious
child,’ Mama marveled. ‘Will you boys stay to party?’

‘We got a little work to finish,’ Luke decided to save them both money, ‘We’ll be back later.’

As they left, the man no higher than five feet in cowboy boots opened the door for them.

‘
Come back by yourself
,’ Dove was almost sure he heard the little man whisper; yet it had been said so low that they were a full block away before the whisper began to draw him back.

‘Sure would of admired to tarry there,’ he sighed heavily, ‘a little ying-yang never hurt a man.’

‘Terrible waste of hard-earned money, son,’ Luke counseled him like a father.

‘Just speaking for yourself, I deem,’ Dove corrected him like a friend.

‘Too much of that thing and they’ll be carrying you away, boy.’

‘Nothin’ wrong with that,’ Dove reflected, ‘inasmuch as it was that thing that brought me here. I’ll tell you just what, Luke,’ he stopped right where he stood: ‘I’m just
urnin
’ for ying-yang.’

‘See you back home, boy,’ Luke dismissed him. ‘Just don’t bring anything home with you.’

Dove hurried back up the street, afraid the little man might have left. It didn’t seem to him that he could regain entrance without being authorized by a friend.

‘My name is Finnerty,’ he told Dove, ‘follow me.’

And led Dove downhill toward the docks. Halfway downhill he turned into a tiled doorway that still held rusted hinges of a time when the place had had swinging doors. A one-story building built on its incline toward the river.

Although Prohibition was good as done, habits it had formed in those who had had their living off it for years could not be changed overnight. Every self-respecting speak-easy devised its own secret knock, peep-hole and password. Buyers wanted more than to walk through an open door, they wished to be admitted to a mystery. More, they wished to belong to a mystery.

After Finnerty had given the buzzer three quick shots, he waited a moment and added a fourth; then both stood in silence before a silent door.

‘Maybe aint nobody home,’ Dove ventured.

‘He’s squirrel-eyeing us this minute from behind the curtain,’ Finnerty confided without glancing at the window, ‘to see if we’re the type that demands service. If we buzz him again, we don’t get in. Doc just won’t be bossed.’

At last the door opened enough to let a white bug of a nose materialize before them. ‘Password?’ the nose demanded.

‘Respect is the key,’ Finnerty replied, and got past the old man. So Dove said it too and both were inside.

Where along the back bar’s thousand bottles, Old Doc Dockery’s hundred dolls remembered the twisted twenties.

Dark-eyed, dressy little town dolls and dutch-bobbed blondies from windmilled countrysides, redhaired colleens and gypsy dolls, a cowgirl cutie in a fringed buckskin and a Broadway baby in a fur boa, a geisha whose eyes were quarter-moons and another who had bobbed her hair and gone all out in Babylon; for her eyes were dollar-signs.

A penny-eyed doll and a button-eyed doll whose buttons said ‘Vote for Cox’; a cross-eyed doll no longer comical, and a doll wearing a bird of paradise. And one little down-and-out bum of a Raggedy Ann with patches on her skirt and wrinkles in her neck; right in the middle where the bar lights could make a small halo about her.

Yet birds of paradise or Raggedy Anns, though one pretended to be Dutch, one Irish and one Japanese, all had seen the headlines on St Valentine’s Day and had dated Harry Greb. Some had had good luck and some had had bad, but all had been born to the twenties and had died when the twenties were done.

Some of broken hearts when Wallace Reid had died. Some had gone on the nod waiting for Dempsey to fight Harry Wills. Others had grown weary after Starr Faithful had passed. One by one they had nodded off, taking their good luck and taking their bad.

(Raggedy Ann’s, of course, had been worse than the others, that was plain enough by her patches. And perhaps was the reason she had the place of honor right in the middle.)

‘There’s no price on them,’ Dockery warned everyone, ‘They’re not for sale and neither am I. Respect gets you in here and disrespect gets you out. Respect, respect is the key.’ No one was allowed to dicker for his dolls, no hand but his own could touch them.

Respect for the dead of a dead decade – that was the key.

The old man preferred the kind of drinker who asked that his glass be washed after every drink. As some men wish to be always drunken, as some women wish to be always in love, Doc Dockery wished to be always clean. To be clean and cleaning.

People, of course, could not be made clean. What kind of filth the old man had waded in neck-deep, of which he still fought to free himself in his lonely white-haired age, or what deep disease was concealed by this passion for hygiene was not clear. Yet it was plain that it had at last turned all his women to dolls.

Respect, that was the key. Respect for his women, and for his music too. His music that was
Stardust, Stormy Weather, Bye Bye Blackbird, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, My Bill, Paper Doll, Red Sails in the Sunset and Tie Me To Your Apron Strings Again
.

To this lopsided shambles owned by this unlicensed ghost, this speakeasy spook who had been alive once but had died in the crash and was now only haunting the thirties, came trudging, some uphill and some down, all those who could not admit that the money was spent, the dream was over; the magic done. They still wore the clothes they wore before 1929 and no one knew when they might buy clothes again.

By and large they were theater people who had lost their theater: ingénues, leading men, stagehands, ticket brokers, managers of road shows, starlets and prima donnas. Albeit that, just for the time being of course, they were ‘hostesses,’ con artists, sneak thieves, con-men, procurers, cardsharps, pennymatchers; and a few honest just plain bums.

The first thing Dove saw when he entered the cave was the lion-headed amputee they had left at the brothel. By what alley-route he had beat them here only someone who lived on ball-bearings could know.

Finnerty drank with his back to the half-man, indicating to Dove that was the wisest way. So Dove felt somehow relieved when he heard the skated platform wheel down the floor, out the door and onto the open street.

Then, ready to let the murmuring hours spin, he put a nickel in the juke to help them begin.

the machine began

‘Now I’ll come to the point,’ Finnerty informed Dove when the bubbles all were blown, ‘I need the help of a healthy boy. I take it your health is as good as it appears.’

‘A might better, mister,’ Dove made a conservative guess, ‘and I’m always ready to make an honest dollar.’

‘You can call me Oliver, for that’s my name.’

‘You can call me Tex. For that’s where I’m from.’

‘My line of work, as you may have guessed, Tex, is women. Do you know anything about them?’

‘I know that if God made anything better I aint come across it yet, but that’s as far as my knowledge goes.’

‘In that case it don’t go far,’ Oliver decided, ‘but the question is whether you’re interested in going to bed with a young woman who has never been to bed with a man before.’

‘Mister, I’m a Southern boy and wouldn’t disadvantage no young girl that way.’

‘Southern don’t enter into this, Tex,’ Finnerty assured him, ‘The young woman is bound and determined to hustle. It’s all settled but the bother and inconvenience of breaking her in.’

‘Your field being women,’ Dove pointed out, ‘I reckon that’s your job, mister.’

‘Why, that’s precisely the reason I
can’t
, don’t you see?’ Finnerty tried patience. ‘If I did it she could come back a year from now and law me on the white slave act, for I’ve a record in that line I don’t mind admitting. I’ve already been busted on that charge once, and I don’t cherish being busted again. But someone like yourself that she’ll never see again – Oh, don’t be afraid of having to use force, for you shant. You won’t even have to undress this child.’

‘That don’t sound like no virgin girl to me,’ Dove told the pander.

‘That’s her claim, so I take her at her word,’ Finnerty told Dove. ‘The point is that, if you did me this one small favor, she couldn’t make that claim in the future. Do you follow me?’

‘I follow you to a certain point,’ Dove decided, ‘after that it’s a mite unclear.’

‘Maybe this will clear things up.’

Dove put his hands stiffly behind his back. ‘Mister, I can’t read my own name if it was writ on the side of a barn, but I know a hundred dollar bill when I see one. And I think you’d best put that one away.’

Finnerty tucked it into Dove’s breast pocket.

‘Mister, I can’t take that,’ Dove told him firmly without making a move to give it back.

‘Don’t worry,’ Finnerty promised, ‘You’re
not
taking it, country boy. You’re carrying it for me, that’s all. You’re carrying it across the street and up the stairs to a room where this young lady is waiting for you. When you come in the room you’ll hand it to her without a word – if I know her greedy little heart she’ll put it in her slipper and you take it from there.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘She’ll tell you that herself, country boy.’

They were at the back entrance of the house which they’d entered by the front before Dove hesitated.

‘Just one thing I’d like to ask, mister.’

‘What’s that?’ Finnerty was too close behind him.

‘I’d rather you call me Tex ’stead of country boy.’

‘Right-o, Tex,’ Finnerty agreed, and shook Dove’s hand to seal the deal.

Dove shook, and stepped through the door Oliver held wide.

A girl with the pallor of one who lives indoors, one low of flesh but high of bone, in red shorts and red halter. Dove heard the door lock behind him.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

‘Floralee,’ she told him, ‘and I sing like a damned bird. But how did I fly here?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know, country girl,’ Dove told her, ‘but I’m to give you this.’

He took his last ten dollar bill and handed it to her. Just as Finnerty had said, she had a greedy little heart, for she stuffed it down her slipper right away without even bothering to glance at it and snapped the button that held up her shorts.

If Dove, in the minutes that followed, heard murmured laughter from behind a wall, he didn’t let that divert him from the sums he had now to do in his head.

‘It costes me ten dollars to make a hundred,’ he figured, ‘at that rate I don’t see how I can lose.’

On a morning so damp the salt wouldn’t dust Dove wakened feeling like something chewed up and spat out. His seersucker, hung on a nail on the wall, looked like something fished out of the river. Everything his eyes fell upon looked fished-out or spat-out. He had a big bad head and held it hard, mourning ‘Oh, it drinked dandy but Lord the afterwards. The way the world is going I don’t think it’ll last.’

But the Financial Counsellor was whistling cheerfully as he buttoned himself into a freshly pressed financial-looking suit.

‘Happened on a
most
curious certificate,’ he announced as soon as he saw Dove get one sick eye wide, and drew it forth like a document. ‘What do you reckon happen when one of them girls trots all the way downtown for a free marcel?’

‘Reckon she gets herself fixed up right pretty,’ Dove took a hazy guess.

‘Reckon she do if she got three-fifty. Which you know very well she don’t. Did you
read
this thing you’re selling?’

For once Dove was glad he couldn’t.

Fort touched a prong of his sunglasses to the fatal figures. ‘I warned you to stay clear of that Georgia hand,’ he reminded Dove, ‘now my advice is that you stay indoors. There must be a chance of husbands on the lookout for a country-lookin’ gin-head by now.’

‘I was only tryin’ to make an honest dollar in a crooked sort of way,’ Dove explained.

For reply Fort fastened his face one moment to the mirror and must have been pleased by what he saw. For he left with a confident, executive stride, a man who’d be rich in six weeks if not in five.

Dove went to the window. Street to sky, New Orleans looked shrouded. He saw its fearful loneliness. He felt its dreadful heat. ‘It’s a misling day,’ he thought, ‘I reckon I don’t deserve to rise, doin’ that innocent country girl the way I done. What’s to become of her now?’